I didn't see a thread about this, so I thought I'd bring it to everyone's attention. Mythic, of Paul Barnett fame, just got shut down.

http://www.polygon.com/2014/5/29/5762140/mythic-warhammer-online-dev-shuttered

Lots of people losing jobs today, what with the Harmonix news. My thoughts go out to everyone affected.

Holy shit, Carrie Gouskos was the director of operations for Mythic, is she out of a job too?

Sad to see people losing their jobs over what ultimately is mismanagement and misappropriation of the mobile market.

EA said they would try their best to find jobs for those affected within the company, so hopefully not everyone is out of work.

Very likely. Giant Bomb should hire her.

I feel bad for all these people, and hope they find new employment soon. They were a talented bunch.

@pimblycharles: What if they already hired her? #conspiracies #followthemoney

Super sad day for developers, first Harmonix, now this. Warhammer Online was such a cool game. Another one for the EA pile. I dread the day Bioware gets shut down.

It's unfortunate that some people are losing their jobs, but the list of games that Mythic has produced over the last ten years is pretty underwhelming.

Good luck to all brothers and sisters out of a job.

:(

Giant Bomb should hire everybody who has ever been fired from anywhere.

Mythic didn't actually make anything big since Warhammer Online, did they? This is probably a bummer for people who liked that game (and Dark Age of Camelot, to go further back), but I wouldn't be surprised if they've been on the chopping block for a while.

I'm going to be pretty bummed when this is Bioware in 5-8 years.

Carrie Gouskos, Senior Editor at Giant Bomb. In my dreams...

Hang on a second, they were in Fairfax, VA? Huh, small world.

Get them to do a shitty F2P game with a revered IP and then shut them down when it fails. This image has been updated and going round -



I'm not surprised by this anymore, 'tis the EA way. Watch out, Visceral.

I am a big Paul Barnett fan. It was sad to see him defend the micro transactions in dungeon keeper. I am glad he can move on to a better company.

Carrie Gouskos come back home to GiantBomb :)

...How big of a Paul Barnett are we talking here?

I was a huge believer in the promise of Warhammer Online. In the end, it didn't really come together for me. I kinda looked forward to seeing what Mythic would be coming up next. Alas - nothing is the answer.

All the best to those out of a job.

@yummylee said:

Like a 10, maybe 12-pounder? Like an Atlantic Paul Barnett?

@yummylee: fuck forgot the word fan sorry for that

That is because only one game they made mattered Dark Age of Camelot, Warhammer was being made while they were acquired by EA which they rushed to market, Mythic never got pushed to do another game after that.

EA murdered that company.

lol don't apologise. As far as flubs go that was pretty great :P

@razielcuts: you forgot about Criterion.

hmmmmmm, they could go to Giantbomb east? But seriously MMOs on the decline, warhammers never did as well as expected, and then on top of it they did the most controversial Mobile game, so it's not unexpected this would happen.

Poor Paul, poor carrie, poor everyone else. I remember being stupidly excited for WAR before it's release. Seeing Paul's seething enthusiasm in the class preview videos that leas up to the games release was a huge reason I decided to purchase WAR and subscribe. It was a Warhammer game from people who seemed to really give a shit about the license and were really trying to do something different with an MMO. That game still has some of the most bonkers level designs for major hubs. I remember the Chaos hub city straight up having demons roaming around certain area who would just attack you on sight if you strayed outside the main streets.

I've always enjoyed seeing Paul and Carrie pop up around E3 or GDC or during GOTY. Hopefully the shadow of Dungeon Keeper Mobile doesn't haunt them and I sincerely wish them and everyone else from Mythic the best in the future.

Best of luck to them all. Especially Carrie. Who would be a great fit for a personality-driven video game website. Hopefully she can find something like that.

they haven't exactly been putting out hot titles recently, or like ever it feels like, but it still sucks that people are out of the job. It does feel like its been a long time coming though.

EA does it again.

Why do companies never learn?

Well they made it way longer than most development studios under EA.

EA shattered my soul with shuttering Pandemic and the Westwood absorption thing, so these hits are a little softer since there's nothing to shatter anymore.

But still, I hope these folks aren't out of jobs for too long. Always sucks when these things happen.

I find it funny you guys keep blaming EA. This was called inevitability. Warhammer Online tanked in a big way, Mythic had been working on it well before the EA acquisition. It was already over promising, over budget, and miss managed before EA touched it. The Dungeon Keeper is the only thing they have made since then and it was just plain bad. Did EA "force" them to make it? Maybe. But I am pretty sure EA didn't say "make it as shitty as you can" they wanted it to be good a lot more than you guys did I wager because their money is on the line not their nostalgia.

When companies that make things don't make any things that are very good for like a decade straight or longer they go out of business. EA is the only reason they even survived this long.

Condolences to anyone who worked there. Man, what terrible timing for Giantbomb, too. I'm sure we wouldn't have made this big deal about taking any and all applications if Carrie wanted to work here. The decisions already been made, this is just going to fuel all sorts of crazy speculation.

I totally hope I'm wrong, they saw this coming and the only reason Mythic is shutting down is because Carrie was a vital piece of the operation and without her they had to close the doors.

Not even remotely surprised by this news. Well, no, actually, I'm surprised it took this long if I'm being honest. Nothing against the people who work there, as I'm sure they're all talented individuals, but I would say it was clear this studio was having major management issues or something ever since WAR and they just never recovered. WAR was actually really promising too. And I don't mean the marketing/PR bullshit they tried to feed us. I mean, in my opinion, the game was never bad. It had issues, but it was really fun. The problem was the game always felt like it was one or two big patches (consisting of bug fixes, and balance/QoL changes) away from being a major MMO contender and they just never actually fixed anything that mattered, Oh well, sucks, but what can ya do?

Carrie is the new Editor BET ON IT!

And EA wonder why they have such a bad perception... sad to see people potentially be out of work.

I wonder if Dragon Age: Inquisition launches with Day 1 DLC (this is a given) and microtransactions from the get go (which I consider to be the much worse thing).

Mythic has been a skeleton crew for a long time.

They may have been working on WAR before but EA pushed that game to market before it was ready, and it isn't Mythic's fault that EA fired most of the staff after WAR tanked and they let the company rot for awhile and set them to work on a mobile game that I am sure EA had No Part Whatsoever in setting how that game was. Mythic hasn't been the same company for a long time.

@thunderslash: Meh shes a nice person but come on, she's nowhere near funny and silly enough to fill Vinny's shoes on the podcast/upf. I'm sure she'll find another job in the industry quickly, Giantbomb doesn't need to turn into a charity site hiring unemployed former developers just because they're friends of the site.

Anyways, this news is no surprise and I'm amazed people are getting mad at EA over it. Mythic hasn't produced anything of value in many years despite a long history of lofty promises. If you can't make good, well selling games, you're not going to stay as a studio forever.

@razielcuts: That would be a lot less dumb if Bioware weren't on it.

This was inevitable. It's an MMO brand in a post-MMO world. Still, I will mourn them along with my lost youth.

It wasn't like there wasn't a clear and large history of companies trying to take a "popular franchise RPG and turn into the MMO" and failing at it. Both Bioware and Mythic fell into the trap and harmed them badly. Looking back at Warhammer Online, I'm not sure what Mythic was thinking or planning where they thought they could avoid this outcome.

I agree with the sentiment that this news shouldn't be that surprising. Mythic always seemed to me to be a studio that had a lot of talented and creative folks, but somehow they were never able to translate that into their games. Something about the creative or design structure seemed to hold them back, whether it was the mandate from on high telling them to compete with WoW and get into micro-transaction based nostalgia bait, or whether it was something internal. If anything, considering EA's track record, the surprising thing here is that they didn't shutter them sooner.

It sucks when people are put out of a job, but as usual the best talent will hopefully land on their feet - I can't imagine Paul and Carrie will be out of work for long - and being freed from the creative yoke that strangled Mythic might lead to some really great things down the line.

And this is just a hunch, but I don't think Carrie is coming back to the games press, at least not yet. It's a quick assumption to jump to and a nice thought for those of us who remember how awesome she was at GameSpot, but she climbed the ladder at Mythic and earned herself a senior position, which means she's doing something right and still has something to offer the world in this profession. And almost every other time a former press personality has left a games job (Greg Kasavin leaving EALA, Rich Gallup leaving 38 Studios etc.), they proceed to get another games job, rather than re-joining the press. That decision worked out real well for Greg, if the critical acclaim that Bastion and Transistor have received is anything to go by.

Mythic became a shell of its former self. Warhammer MMO didn't go over well, and the support for it was tragic at beast. The MOBA...thing...they made wasn't much better. That Dungeon Keeper mobile game? Fucking travesty.

Essentially, Mythic became EA's lapdog, doing whatever they were asked to do. If anything, it should be liberating that they are finally out of EA's grasp.

Meanwhile, Barnett did some good work with EA to get some of their classic PC titles available again through digital distribution. Wing Commander is finally available!

Moreover, there are plenty of guys over there that are already starting a new thing that will continue support for Dark Ages of Camelot. I still can't believe that game is going, but when you create greatness, it carries on.

I'm sure many of them will also...rather quickly...find themselves either employed or hitting the Kickstarter/indie scene with new projects.

Good luck to everyone affected. I enjoyed many of your products...although not in recent years.

Sad but not surprising. They weren't doing much of anything for the last few years

@jakob187: It's worth noting that Warhammer Online was fucking great for 6 months or so (while I was playing it, naturally); it was a community of 100,000 or so and pretty much all you did was log on, kill people in pvp (RvR) and that was it; nonstop murder, all day every day; sometimes with literally hundreds of people on either side. Such joys, such valor, such trolling. They eventually tried to balance it like WoW or some shit and then it sucked, but I was long gone by then. Other than DAoC it was by far the best PvP MMO ever.

#HireCarrie

@fredchuckdave: What I remember of the PvP for the four months I played at launch was Bright Wizards murdering everyone on the map and everyone else struggling to find any level of fun. The public quests were more fun. Maybe they fixed a lot of that afterwards, but unless you were a Bright Wizard or a Squig Herder, you were getting fucked up in PvP. It was miserable. I really liked the world, though. Loved doing PvE stuff, which is odd for me since I'm a hardcore PvP'er.

@jakob187: They eventually made it so AoE was limited to 9 players so bomb groups fell slightly out of favor; though there's something to be said for killing a group of 60 people with 6. It was just crazy all around, stealth classes could burst down everyone except defensive tanks in 2 GCDs, BWs/Sorcs could murder people quite well but were also super easy to kill, even the worst classes had the tools to burst someone down in seconds or alternatively just screw them over. Chosen and Knights of the Blazing Sun (and to a lesser extent Ironbreakers; no aura just broken) were actually the most overpowered classes, thanks to having 3 simultaneous auras at once; but even the worst tanking class in the game had people gearing them defensively so that they could withstand literally 40 people attacking them at once. Magnificent. None of this "lets make a stat that negates other stats, how fun!" nonsense. It was balanced by virtue of being imbalanced appropriately; small fights without amazing healers on both sides lasted seconds not minutes.

I'm not really plugging it but anyone who cared about Mythic mmo games should check out Camelot Unchained. It's headed by the original guy behind them all.

@fredchuckdave: When it all comes down to it, I played Marauder...so I was fucked from the get-go. LOL